Bronfman wants a service levy

Another Wired piece. This time pointing to Warner Music's plan to "bundle a monthly fee into consumers' Internet service bills for unlimited access to music."

Reznor v Radiohead on Wired

10 Rounds head to head courtesy of the good folks over at Wired

Billy Bragg on Bebo

The chaps over at Coolfer are linking to an interesting story about Billy Bragg's comments on sites that use musicians to drive traffic towards advertisement-ridden web pages but don't remunerate the musos themselves.

This takes me back down my memory lane to what I like to call the golden age of MP3 with the original MP3.com which ran a payback-for-playback scheme where artists were paid from a pool generated by advertising for their playback. I still have my first royalty check . . . sigh

Sony + Subscriptions - DRM???

An engadget report suggests that Sony will shortly launch a subscription-based music service. No big news there - everyone else is doing it, or about to. But the fine print is that it will be ipod compatible which leads to speculation that it will be DRM-free (because apple has so far refued to licence Fairplay to anyone, let alone Sony). We'll wait and see...

Exetel and p2p

Looks like Australian ISP Exetel has caved into the demands of MIPI (the local industry's anti-piracy police) and blocked users who partake a little too much in p2p activity. More in a SMH article here, but not much detail as to how the company identifies such users. Seeing as the rest of the Australian ISPs (and the industry body) aren't too keen on treating their customers in this way, one has to suspect that exodus won't just be the name of a Leon Uris novel. Then again, it's a policy that Exetel say they have been implementing for 2 years so may be a MSM beatup. Whirlpool discussion here.

TechDirt clarifies

The Music 2.0 meme is read by some as the 'Death of the Label'. But as we allude to in our recent 'Towards 2.0" paper (link somewhere on this site) it's way more complicated than that. Whatever new business models emerge require resources and brains that need to come from somewhere, so it's conceivable that clever labels might adapt. Which is all preamble to a nice post from Techdirt clarifying a few thoughts.

New IPod generation

Inspired by the Nokia "comes with music" handset, Apple is thinking of launching a new generation Ipod that would give to consumers free access to the entire ITunes library, in exchange of paying a premium price for the device.

Music industry is only partially happy to have found a new source of income: Apple is thinking of paying only $20 to the music industry partner for each device sold, against the $80 paid by Nokia.

On the consumer side, marketing researches have shown that consumers would pay up to $100 more to have free unlimited access to ITunes for the entire life of the device.